Thai PM claims innocence amid impeachment threat

BANGKOK: Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Thursday protested her innocence after an anti-corruption panel filed charges of neglect of duty that could lead to her removal from office.

Yingluck, who has faced almost four months of mass street protests demanding her resignation, questioned why the investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) into an expensive rice subsidy scheme had apparently been fast-tracked.

“I reaffirm that I am innocent of the accusations by the NACC,” Yingluck said on her official Facebook page.

“Even though I am accused of criminal charges and face removal [from office], which were the wishes of people who want to overthrow the government, I am willing to cooperate to establish the facts,” she added.

The NACC says Yingluck ignored warnings that the rice scheme was fostering corruption and causing financial losses. She has been summoned to hear the charges on February 27.

Yingluck urged the panel not to rush to deliver a ruling “which may be criticized by society as benefiting people who want to overthrow the government”. She noted that similar complaints against the previous administration were still under investigation.

Her critics say the controversial scheme, which guarantees farmers above-market rates for rice, has encouraged corruption, drained the public coffers and left the country with a mountain of unsold stock.

Yingluck said she was simply trying to improve the lives of farmers.

In another legal setback to Yingluck, a Civil Court on Wednesday ordered the government not to use force against peaceful protests, limiting the authorities’ scope to deal with opposition rallies that have descended into violence on several occasions.

Authorities announced they would swiftly appeal the decision, saying it has crippled their ability to keep order and uphold the law.

“Protesters can lay siege to government offices and obstruct elections as the public has seen,” Tarit Pengdith, of the agency in charge of the security response to the crisis, said in a televised address Thursday.

“That’s not right,” he said, adding their work “has been stopped” by the court ruling.

Sixteen people have been killed, both protesters and policemen, and hundreds injured in gunfire and grenade blasts linked to demonstrations.

Protesters accuse Yingluck’s billionaire family of using taxpayers’ money to buy the loyalty of rural voters through populist policies such as the rice scheme.

The opposition demonstrators want Yingluck to step down and make way for a temporary unelected government that would oversee loosely defined reforms to tackle corruption and alleged vote-buying.

They accuse her hugely divisive brother Thaksin, a former premier ousted in a 2006 coup and successful businessman, of running the government from overseas, where he lives to avoid a jail term on corruption charges.

The country’s main opposition party boycotted a February 2 election, which Yingluck called to try to defuse the protests. The results are not expected to be known until balloting is held in constituencies where voting was disrupted by protesters.